So, the second weekend of May has come and gone, and with it Nationals for Production, Single Stack, Revolver, and Limited 10.

Timing

First, the match was Mother’s Day weekend. You can say it’s a greeting card holiday sure, but this was just such an unforced error. A week earlier or a week later wouldn’t have worked? You don’t schedule matches on the weekend of major holidays if you can avoid it, and minor ones should be avoided where possible.

Of course, the problem is they have to find three different weeks on the calendar for three different Nationals this year. If there was just one Nationals, the way there’s just one World Shoot and everyone picks their division and shoots heads up, presumably it would be easier to schedule them around holidays. (It would also allow people to actually shoot together more, instead of maximizing the opportunities for one person to win multiple titles. I have some friends shooting High Cap Nationals, and considered putting a dot on one of my Tanfoglios to shoot with them. But alas, Carry Optics, isn’t in that Nationals, it’s in the other one.)

And then there’s the issue that it just started getting warm enough to practice in most of the country, and asking folks to be trained up to contest the biggest title of the year in the middle of spring is not a great idea. Is it any surprise that the two closest contenders are both from desert areas where training up was much more reasonable?

Yes, I know that Single Stack Nationals has always been in the spring. While Single Stack is a niche division, there are shooters that invest heavily in competing in it, and it was never a good thing to leave them with nothing but their state match to work towards all summer. (That’s the boat I’m in now too. The Carolina Classic here in NC is the only other big match of the calendar, four months away.)

Treating Single Stack like a real division and having them shoot with all the other divisions at the Nine Days of Nationals in 2018 was a marked improvement. Going back to a spring Nationals for them and throwing in Production is a step backward. And yes, I feel the same way about matches like Area 6 being in the spring as well. (As an aside, when was the last time two years in a row had anything close to a similar Nationals schedule? Why the need to keep erratically changing it up as though the ideal formula is a matter of trial and error?)

Facility

This was my first trip to the CMP range in Talladega, and I have to say it’s not bad at all. The bays are large, and split fairly well in three zones. I’ve heard that in return for USPSA hosting so many matches there, the option is on the table to build another set of bays, to bring the whole range up to being able to host something like a 24 stage match to rival the bigger Nationals in recent memory. I certainly think a Nationals schedule of 8 stages per day for 3 days, assuming staff reset (more on that later) is completely reasonable and would make for a good Nationals.

The way the actual space was used is a mixed bag. Having chrono, the test fire bay, and the vendor area all on one big stage worked reasonably well. That said, the test fire bay was just steel targets. If I had an optic I was trying to zero due to changing dots or getting banged up on the way, I’m not sure it would have been ideal. Also, one porta john for every two or three stages is not enough.

Dinner and awards were a debacle, as has been covered elsewhere. I had been warned that the banquet food was bad by friends who were there for last year’s Single Stack Nationals, so when I saw the spread I was impressed. The food was good! But this time, they had quality, but not enough quantity and about half the attendees got nothing to eat. Perhaps by the fall they can get a handle on both dimensions of a good meal.

Rather than setting up the awards where everyone on the balcony could see, they used the little platform that I suppose was built for the purpose. The end result was that about 20% of the attendees could see anything.

And then the walking of the prize table was another unforced error. Rather than calling folks into the building in groups (“Production 1-20, go inside.”, “Limited 10 20-40, head in.”) they just told everyone to go inside and line up. Unfortunately the space allowed for about three people to stand abreast, and we were supposed to form four different lines for four different divisions. If this were the first time that this crew were running a match, or a new administration had just started, I suppose this kind of issue could be excused. But they literally do three or more Nationals every single year. How is this not a solved problem with a boring process to be followed?

Stages

The stages this year were, for the most part, fairly good and better than the Nationals stages in recent memory. A friend told me that Jake Martens, who apparently designed the stages, told him that he borrowed heavily from 2013-era Extreme Euro Open stage designs. (For the record, I think there’s nothing wrong with taking inspiration and even basically copying good stages. Nationals stages should represent the best our sport has to offer.)

The challenges were varied, and generally tested a good range of skills, although the shot difficulty was generally easy. Stage 4 is a good example of a stage that would be improved by deleting a third to half the targets in each array; that retains the need to navigate the shooting area while putting a greater emphasis on shooting good points and less on raw splits.

I’m one of those people that thinks that testing the core stand-and-shoot skills at a Nationals isn’t a bad thing, including one-handed shooting. There was one stage that featured each of strong and weak hand only, which was good to see.

There were a few stages like 6 and 18 where the shooting area seemed out of proportion to the actual targets, so that the distances between shooting positions didn’t leave much to do except shoot flatfooted at the clusters of targets and then sprint to the next position. Tightening up the shooting area and opening up the angles on targets would have been a real improvement.

The places that included two stages in one bay were invariably the places that backups occurred, primarily because of the lack of staff reset. With the squad split and six of the twelve members of the squad either the shooter, on deck, or just having shot, there were not many hands to reset.

Overall, I think the main issue with the stages is that they were insufficiently challenging in the sense that they didn’t do enough to separate the top shooters. In Production, going into the last day, Mason Lane and JJ were in a dead heat, 0.1 match points apart. By the end of the match, it was Nils and JJ that were 0.6 match points apart, making the margin of victory 0.03%.

That is clear evidence that the stages did not do enough to separate the best shooters. If you believe, as I do, that the primary purpose of the National Championship is to distinguish the best shooter in the country that year, then this match is clearly a failure. If the stages need to be harder and that makes shooting Nationals as a B-class shooter punishing and unpleasant, so be it. There are plenty of matches for them; this one is supposed to be special.

Officiation

As I understand it, this is the first time since 2014 that the staff for the match also got to shoot it, which is hard to believe, but good that it’s been rectified. Competitors who know the rules make better ROs than folks that don’t shoot a match and just run a timer, and competitors self-evidently want to shoot the match to be a part of it, not just observe. If you make people choose, they’ll just pay their match fee and you’ll be left with low-quality officiating, as we saw in the 2018-2020 years in Frostproof.

On the whole, I would say the staff was definitely better this year than 2019, the last year I shot Nationals, which deserves recognition. But it still has a way to go.

The most conspicuous example of this is the fact that the Production National Champion was directly effected by staff that did not keep the steel on their stage calibrated. When JJ shot a popper and then lost calibration, obviously that would have changed the outcome for the match to the tune of 15 match points. The fact that Ashley Rheuark, two squads earlier on the Ladies Super Squad, had a calibration call on that same popper should have been the end of it. But even after JJ shot it, they didn’t fix it until yet another shooter on the Super Squad had to call for calibration on it.

When you are running a stage, one of your main priorities is to keep the stage moving. If there’s a scoring call, pull the target, call the rangemaster, and run the next shooter. But with calibration, that can’t happen. The stage grinds to a halt until a guy on an ATV can come peer at the mark in the paint and then amble back to the shooting area and shoot the piece of steel. If for no other reason than match flow, keeping your steel calibrated is a big deal when running a stage at any Level 2 or above match. That is, of course, to say nothing of actually swinging the outcome of the match.

Coming off the last three big matches I shot being the NC Section, SC Section, and Area 6, I will admit that being told to grab some pasters and paint to reset was strange, although I can’t say it’s surprising. But it was also totally unnecessary. On most stages, the timer and tablet ROs walked the targets one-by-one anyway, and one or two people following behind them could easily have pasted the targets as fast as they were scored.

The better stages with movers already had a staff member assigned to either personally reset the mover or verify the competitor had done it correctly, which results in 95% as much work as just doing it yourself anyway. The idea that competitors at a national championship are anywhere near each others targets, with the opportunity to prematurely paste a hole and create a mike, is absurd.

That’s not to mention the fact that a reshoot due to improper reset is just as bad as having a stage completely blocked waiting for calibration, since it’s time you can’t get back. Eliminating even a few of those on each stage by having the same people reset the movers and paste the targets the same way every time is so obvious as a solution it’s hard to see why it’s only currently done at a handful of matches here in the southeast. (Notably, of course, the World Shoot also operates this way.)

My Performance

My individual shooting was a rollercoaster. I started off Day 1 with two stages that put my score right in the mix with the Super Squad, which was a good feeling. Seeing that, I told myself not to push to overperform or at the same time fall back and coast through the match. Even picking up a Mike/No Shoot on Stage 3 didn’t ruffle me too bad.

Going into the match, I had basically no expectations, having only shot Area 6 and South Carolina in the two months leading up to the match, and having only limited practice. On a few stages like 4, 8 and 17, I decided to just let the speed I was just starting to develop for the year all hang out. The points were crap, but it was fun to just run the gun harder than I had in the past, and actually energized me to practice more and capture the gains that I can see around the corner with what I’m doing. (Obviously, Nationals is usually an inspiration going into the offseason for work to pick up in the spring. In this case, I guess I should count myself lucky that I can start working on those things immediately…?)

While the match was going on, I found myself thinking that the stages like 4 where I was shooting as fast as I could with no real regard for points would be good footage even if they were bad scores. But actually reviewing the video, I’m not actually shooting as fast as it felt in the moment; the feeling of speed, as always, came from shooting before you’re really ready, and so it really is a feeling of unpreparedness that just feels like speed. Instead, it’s the stages like 1 and 14 where I shot 3-5 charlies total and felt in complete control. In a shock to no one, although gripping the gun better may let me blast faster, the real reward is having the gun track better and shooting better points.

And then on day 3, for whatever reason, I just could not put things together. Being able to perform consistently over multiple days is a key skill of National and World level competition, and that was a real weakness here for me. I was unfocused the entire day, including Stage 19 where a malfunctioning GoPro completely distracted me and I just shot on instinct, picking up a Delta and a Mike.

Overall, my placement and percentage were basically in the same place as Nationals in 2019, meaning I haven’t made up much ground but I haven’t really lost any either. A number of stages, particularly 1, 6, and 14 give me a lot of hope that I have the pace to place mid-Super Squad, and those aren’t flukes since I do not feel like those stages were just lucky runs.

More annoying than the scored Mikes were the many fumbled reloads, for no reason at all except lack of practice and relying on hope. That will be a big point of practice going into this season.

As a whole, the match was better than past years Nationals and shows promise for further improvement. The stages were a step in the right direction and the venue was definitely preferable to Frostproof. It’s just hard to feel too good about the match because of the 1-2 punch of it being at the beginning of the season, and the lack of staff reset.

The post 2021 Locap Nationals Wrapup appeared first on Berry Shooting.

(Photo by Trigger Pull Photography)

The highest-profile match to be held in North Carolina has come and gone, and I think it will go down as being largely a success: Rowan County Wildlife Association hosting the 2021 Area 6 Championship.

Stages and Setup

When the stages were first posted, it was definitely a bit confusing. Some of the stages, from designers such as Gerrit Heinrich and Bryce Dupuy, looked excellent. Some of them looked half-baked, at best.

For one thing, many of the stages would not fit in the bays Rowan had available. (Somewhat confusingly, although Rowan had 12 bays available, only 10 were used for the match, with two set aside for sponsors who didn’t show up. One of them was retroactively declared a test fire bay, which I think is a good idea any time you have people flying with guns, especially optics.) For two, some of the designs were just not good.

Take Stage 9. It featured 8 45-degree hoser targets at 3 yards. Having this much of the stage be hosing that tests basically no skills at all does nothing but dilute the value of the rest of the stage, and drive up the hit factor so that accuracy matters less on the rest of the stage. Luckily for us, Rowan doesn’t allow stages that involve shooting into the range floor; all shots have to go into the berms. (You would think the Match Director would figure out restrictions like that, as well as the size of the bays, before getting stages designed.)

Luckily, the local USPSA crew that puts on their excellent monthly match were able to redesign the stages on-the-fly and turn almost all of the bad stage designs into decent stages on the ground. That stage in particular was changed from being up-close hosing to being a challenge of having wide-open targets you wanted to engage while moving, with a few different interesting stage plans. (This was one of the rare few stages where a “anywhere in the shooting area” start position actually works.)

The least interesting stage of the day ended up being Stage 3, which was constructed basically faithful to the diagram. There’s not much you can do to rescue a 3-per stage where all 18 rounds are fired from a single shooting box.

Staff Reset

Another thing that made the match such a success was having dedicated staff to paste and reset each stage. It seemed like this wasn’t announced until a week or two before the actual match, but there were a ton of staff on each stage. As a competitor, obviously this is always going to help you shoot your best. Doubly so when you’re trying to shoot 12 stages in a single day, with 14 people on your squad.

(I heard it second-hand that match leadership thought staff reset goes against the “volunteer nature” of the sport of USPSA. Nobody’s saying we should have caddies and staff reset at local matches, but when people are competing for the second-highest titles annually available in the sport, they should be given every advantage. If anything, expecting competitors to paste for themselves rewards the arrogant hotshot who sits on his ass all day while his squad curses his name and they do all the work. Staff reset is actually the most fair way to run a match.)

The staff also did a good job managing the bays where two stages had been set up. The 2018 Nationals tried to do something like this, where two shooters on a single bay would make ready at the same time, then having the left shooter shoot their stage, unload, step back, while the right shooter went, then both stages were scored in parallel. However this had weird side-effects like the stages not having any uprange-downrange movement, just side-to-side.

Instead, at Area 6, they would have the shooters both ready to go, but the left shooter would load, shoot, and unload before the right shooter loaded and made ready. It removed the complication of having to corral two shooters both with loaded guns, while keeping things moving fairly quickly. And with 14 people on the squad, you had enough time to load mags and re-set to get ready for the second stage. It worked well.

Split-Day Format

One aspect of this match that was new to me was the option to shoot either all 12 stages in one day, Saturday or Sunday, or to split and shoot 6 each day.

In retrospect, the trick to the scheduling is obvious. I just hadn’t seen it done before, but it worked well. In short, of your 12 squads that start Saturday morning, half of them shoot all the way through and half of them stop at lunch time. The ones that stop at lunch are replaced with other half-day squads that shoot for the afternoon, while the all-day shooters finish up the day. Then the next day you do the same thing, and half the squads are all-day squads and the other half are two sets of half-day squads.

Since, to my way of thinking, Area matches should be more like Nationals than state-level matches, this falls right in line with that idea. Nationals should be 3 or 4 half-days to give shooters the best chance to perform at their peak, while also having enough stages to accurately determine the winner. (This fits with the idea that Nationals itself is one step below the World Shoot, which was most recently 5 half-days of shooting.)

My Performance

I went into the match basically straight off the off-season. I’d shot one club match each month January through March, but had done no dry fire or live fire. (I missed the April club match by cutting my hands on some broken glass the night before the match, which also kiboshed practice leading up to the match.)

My reasons for not dry firing leading up to the match basically boil down to my wife and I bringing home our first child in January, so getting the hang of that routine took a bit.

And my reasons for no live fire are the usual for 2021: primers and weather. I have a supply of primers that will last me a year or two of just shooting club matches and a few majors a year, but going out and shooting 500 rounds in two hours in practice like the good old days are gone.

And then of course there’s the issue of weather. I know it’s tradition for the Area 6 match to be in the spring, because it’s hard to work out the schedule of all the Area matches and Nationals without conflict. (Of course, two things that HQ could do to help would be having fewer, ideally one Nationals, and having HQ actually work to coordinate schedules to avoid conflicts, instead of it being a free-for-all.)

I can only guess that the tradition of A6 in the spring is because in parts of Area 6 you can shoot all winter (primarily the ones ending in -orida?). But as the northern-most state in Area 6, that’s not really how it goes for us. So even if I’d had buckets of ammo, the sub-50s highs until about three weeks before the match would have put the kibosh on training up much for the match. (I certainly would not complain if the match moved to the end of the season, leading up to Nationals.)

Given all that, I would say I finished the match pretty much exactly where I deserved: 11th in Production, at 80% of Jacob Hetherington who won the division. It’s definitely interesting to see the top three (Jacob, Sal Luna, and Nils) above 98%, and then fourth place under 90%. The race was really between the three of them, and it was fun to have that level of heat shooting at a club that feels like a second home range to me. I hope they thought it was a good match.

Here’s the video of how my day went:

I can definitely see the mistakes start to creep in as the day went on. I was originally signed up to shoot the two-day format, but logistically that didn’t work out, so it turned out to be an interesting experiment. If I have the chance again next year, I’ll definitely take the two-day option.

As for my individual performance, everything was not necessarily slow, but just sloppy, as you would expect from not having put in the reps to refresh all the fine details. I had to adjust my grip on the draw a few times; my grip pressure was wrong, so I had to work to recover the sights after each shot when they should have been tracking right back for the second shot; I had a number of reloads go bad just from going fast, but not having the precision from familiarity.

Ironically, two of the parts that most burned me were the “dumb hoser” sections: the front hosing half of Stage 11 featuring 18 rounds from basically one position, and the 3-per-target Stage 3. I’ve never been particularly fast on the trigger, and trying to go nuts and shoot as fast as I could pull the trigger resulted in poor points (Stage 10), a miss (Stage 11), and trigger freeze (Stage 3). I could try and say it’s a badge of honor that I don’t train those kinds of skills–ever, really, given my limited training time–but there’s really no excuse for having a gap like that in my game. I can’t say I’ll be able to work on it any time soon, but it’s certainly on my radar.

Overall, I’m glad I shot the match. I seriously considered not competing because I didn’t feel trained up for it. But it was definitely good experience as a shooter, overall a good mix of well-run stages, and fantastic match. Word on the street is that it’ll be back at Rowan next year, so if you can make it, I definitely recommend it.

The post Area 6 2021 Wrapup appeared first on Berry Shooting.